Freedom––Productivity app test

I did some more reading about productivity yesterday, and something that jumped out to me was that procrastination is actually a developed habit. Wanting to get those little dopamine hits throughout the day is a learned habit, and thus breaking it is actually just as hard as breaking any other habit. I’ve definitely learned that before from somewhere, but it was a nice reminder to think about again.

In response, I’m trying to use the Freedom app to block out 1 hour time periods every day where I can’t access a lot of my distractions. It’s still slow going––I can feel myself looking for other distractions to replace it with/for the dopamine hit, but in general it’s been slightly more productive. Often times, I am capable of being productive in that moment, but it’s just really hard to turn my freedom app on in order to induce that period of working. With the scheduling ahead of time, I can set these productive blocks earlier in the day when I’m stronger/more motivated, and when the time comes, it becomes easier to start working.

One hour working blocks is also much longer than I normally do when I’m not crunched for time (when an assignment is due and it’s late at night, however, I’m capable of working for an extended number of hours). I realized that this is a problem, because switching tasks drastically reduces performance, and it normally takes 23minutes to really settle into a task. Anything less than an hour, and I’m not really working at peak performance.

Anyways, I’ll try to keep this up and see if it’ll work for me.

Sam Altman on “Masters of Scale” by Reid Hoffman

First off, Sam Altman gives off more Zuckerberg vibes than Mark Zuckerberg does in my opinion. Like, Sam is lowkey a big nerd––he wears cargo shorts so he can carry around more chargers. I love it haha.

Listening to this podcast, I’ve been learning more and more about what these founders went through in their early days, and I have been steadily surprised by just how smart these people are. You might be thinking, “wow tech billionaires are smart who would’ve guessed,” but it’s really wasn’t that relatable to me until I learned more about them and only after I’ve started going through this process myself. It’s kind of like, you probably know that Usain Bolt is fast, but you probably don’t realize just how fast he is unless you run side by side next to him on a track. The more relatable these people become, the more I realize how smart/OP they are. People say it takes luck to become a billionaire, which is true, but for many of these tech billionaires, it takes a lot more than luck. Yes, there are plenty of billionaires who got to where they are with no real skill, but those are also not the people I respect/am talking about here.

In any case, I spend a lot of time thinking about what it would take to become one of these people. I think I’d be happy if I could get to where they are.

Loving Learning (Codex)

Sam Altman talks in his episode about how people should focus on “love not likes,” which makes a lot of sense. It’s much better to have 100 passionate users than 1million lukewarm users. In the case of Codex, I’d much rather have one thriving page of 100 active users rather than 1000 different pages with only a handful of people on it.

Thus, along with some completely different ideas I’ve been juggling around in my head, I’ve been thinking a lot about Codex and where to build it to.

As of writing this post, where Codex currently stands is we have a functioning version out on the web. We built it mostly earlier on in the semester, took a long break, and then built it out again during Spring break. Its current functionality is a text editor where users can read the most recent version, make edits if they’d like, or set previous versions of the page that they prefer. We also have a upvote/downvote functionality as well as a relatively basic comment functionality (think reddit comment section). All of this is good/functional, but I don’t think it’s revolutionary in any way.

The idea itself has always been rather difficult for me to explain, but I’ll try my best here. Essentially, for myself and many of my friends, classes comprise only a fraction of what we learn every day. Classes are supposed to be the best way to learn, but often it’s frustrating/limited in its structure. The good thing about the Internet is that it’s unlimited in information, you technically have access to the brightest minds in the world, and you can design your own education. However, parsing through all the information in even just one Google search is hard––and if you finally learn what you were searching for, all of that work is lost to the sea of Google results and the next person who comes along has to do that all over again.

Our product is inspired loosely by Github/Reddit. We want flourishing, open-source communities of passionate individuals to work together on guides and learn new things. And I think our current platform can provide that for people, if they wanted to use it––the only issue is that I don’t think we’ve built a product yet that people will love.

There’s a really good blog post that talks about what we want to build: https://www.usv.com/writing/2018/11/looking-for-syllabus-2-0/

It talks about the idea of a modern online syllabus 2.0. We were already planning to build pretty much exactly what they talk about in the idea of interactive, annotated comment threads. The web is social but online learning is static––this is the only current advantage conventional, in-person classes hold over online learning. Online learning is static and you don’t have quality access to peers/professors. This is a problem exposed by the current quarantine situation and one that we hope to solve.

Fixing Problems with Codex

I hope that in all my years of being a student, I’ve figured out at least some of what I want fixed about the current educational software. For example, Piazza is a super ugly software, Courseworks is really nothing special, yet they’re almost universally used. What about them can be fixed/improved by Codex?

The reason why I’m targetting school software is that that’s my current area of expertise––I’m not too sure I’d be able to compete in the space of general online learning just yet. An easier first step is to figure out what I want, which is indicative of what my peers want, and then introduce my app to my peers (which I have easy access to because I’m a student).

I think what makes Piazza so great is that it has a completely open/flowing dialogue––people love it for this reason because you can ask easy questions. However, what if, while you were reading lecture/textbook notes, you could immediately highlight sections of the text and ask questions. Or, just like stackoverflow, if you didn’t get a section of the text, someone may have the same exact question! And you can follow the thread right there and learn whatever they’re talking about––ofc, you can turn off this functionality if you want, and it’d be just like how things are right now.

My concern is that even with the option to turn things off, it might be annoying to users to have to read around the highlights/comment threads. Piazza is successful in its simplicity, and I’m afraid that adding complications might decrease user satisfaction. But, I do think that specific documents, perhaps TA notes, could have this functionality––then, people who want this specific functionality will have access to it. Again, it’s better to lose a handful of users if it means that we can have users that legitimately love the product.

Anyways, I will probably keep thinking about this as well as other problems with existing educational software. Let me know if you think of anything you see as a problem! I’d be more than happy to chat.

Now, time to start coding everything up.